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Tank Man photographer Jeff Widener on the making of an iconic image

The world does not know the identity of the young man who defiantly blocked a column of tanks, groceries in hand, but his picture has come to represent the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

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Jeff Widener's iconic image of Tank Man. Photos: Jeff Widener/Associated Press

Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima; Edward T. Adams’ Saigon Execution; Nick Ut’s The Terror of War (the Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack); Hubert Van Es’ evacuation of CIA station personnel from Saigon – many of the most iconic 20th-century news photographs were taken in Asia, in times of conflict. To that list can be added the picture of a lone defiant protester standing in front of a row of tanks in Beijing, in June, 1989, as the military suppressed demonstrations that had been ongoing since April.

This is the story of how the image of that anonymous protester, now known as Tank Man, arrived on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, as told by the American photographer who took it, Jeff Widener.

EASTERN PROMISE My posting as Southeast Asia picture editor for Associated Press in Bangkok in 1987 was the envy of most photojournalists. It was nicknamed the ‘Eddie Adams posting’ after the famed Vietnam photographer, because of all the travelling he did in Asia. I recall sitting up in the first-class section of a Boeing 747, which was an [Associated Press] tradition for first-time overseas postings. My plane had touched down in Hong Kong on a warm damp night for the connecting flight to Bangkok.

Jeff Widener (left) and fellow photographer Liu Heung Shing in Tiananmen Square before the crackdown.
Jeff Widener (left) and fellow photographer Liu Heung Shing in Tiananmen Square before the crackdown.

I was both excited and scared because Bangkok was a high-risk posting. As I looked through the window at the rainy runway lights, I began thinking of two things that scared me: bullets and bugs. I hate insects and Asia has them the size of Nike sneakers. Little did I know just how much travel, gunfire and big bugs I would experience.

For eight years I lived the life of luxury, travelling business and first class, staying in five-star hotels and covering some of the biggest and most dangerous stories in Asia. Everything from Michael Jackson to the Queen of England; coups in Afghanistan to Miss Universe in Taiwan; you name the story and I was probably there. I also had a wonderful opportunity to meet some great locally based photographers who I was in charge of in the region. Hong Kong [AP] photographer Vincent Yu is, in my opinion, one of the best photojournalists in the profession.

WHERE THERE’S A WILL … In 1989, I was in Bangkok monitoring the situation in Beijing. When the order came to book a flight, I went to the Chinese embassy in Thailand and requested a journalist visa but, as expected, the vice-counsel said: ‘Mr Widener, it would not be convenient for you to go to Beijing right now.’ I thought that was such an eloquent way of saying, ‘No chance in hell’.

Mark Footer joined the Post in 1999, having been the magazine and book buyer for Tower Records in Hong Kong. He started on the business desk before moving, in 2006, to Post Magazine, of which he was editor until 2019. He took on a secondary role as travel editor in 2009.
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